The phone rang in the middle of the morning, and Kathy Ford answered it. The man on the other end said he was a magistrate from Mount Storm, and he needed to ask her some questions about checks from the restaurant. He believed they were dealing with check fraud. He asked her to meet him at three o’clock.
The restaurant was quiet. Kathy hung up and went back to work. Around one, the phone rang again. An undercover cop this time.
He told Kathy they were investigating the restaurant’s liquor license. Several businesses in the area had already been shut down for selling alcohol to minors. Kathy told her mother to make sure she checked everyone’s ID from now on. Her mother asked who had called.
Kathy wouldn’t say. “No, he’ll lose his job,” was all she said. Her shift ended, and she left for home. Her mother asked where she was going.
Kathy wouldn’t answer that either. She said she’d be back shortly. Another waitress, Pat Parker, had heard part of the conversation. She heard Kathy say, “Who is this?
” and then something else, and then Kathy said she had to go meet somebody. Around two, Kathy came back to the restaurant, changed into nicer clothes, and got into her father’s car. Pat asked where she was going. Kathy didn’t say.
A relative saw her Ford Bronco heading north. That was the last anyone ever saw her. When Kathy didn’t come home, her parents reported her missing that same night. For parents to report their daughter missing after only a few hours was unusual.
Something felt terribly wrong to them. At 8:30 that evening, Paul Farrell, a deputy sheriff in Grant County and a familiar face around town, was at a bowling alley in Oakland, playing in his league. He got a phone call. It was Kathy.
She sounded terrified. She said Darvin had found out something about her. She needed to meet with him right away. Paul left the bowling alley, apologizing to his teammates.
He drove to the school parking lot where they’d agreed to meet. She never showed up. He waited twenty minutes. Nothing.
When he heard she’d been reported missing, he was shocked. He had no idea she was already gone. The little town of Gorman, population just over a hundred, began searching. Richard and Rosalie Ford, Kathy’s parents, put on brave faces.
They had moved their family from Delaware to run the local restaurant, and their nineteen-year-old daughter had blossomed there. Kathy was bright, well-liked, sensible. Everyone thought the world of her. She’d been dating Darvin Moon for three years.
Some people later said Darvin had a horrific temper. Kathy had told a few people she was afraid he might kill her. The police organized search parties. Paul Farrell, being a deputy and a local, helped lead the effort.
The Ford family trusted him. He was respected in the community. A witness named James Coons said he had seen Kathy’s Bronco heading toward Bismarck Road on the day she disappeared. That road ran past Paul Farrell’s trailer.
Days passed. No sign of her. Kathy Bernard, Paul’s girlfriend at the time, was cleaning up around his trailer when she found a note in one of his pants pockets. The note described two people setting up restaurants to sell alcohol to minors using fake IDs.
When she asked him about it, Paul said he was worried someone in town was getting businesses to do that. On February 20th, four days after Kathy vanished, a couple from Gorman were driving through Nashville. They thought they saw Kathy entering a restaurant, dressed as a waitress. When she met their glance, the woman immediately ran to the back of the restaurant.
They told people about it. But it was never proven to be her. On March 2nd, fourteen days after the disappearance, a letter arrived addressed to Kathy’s parents. The handwriting was shaky.
It said that Kathy was nineteen, an adult, and they had to leave fast. She’d come into some dangerous money. They had to get rid of the old man’s Bronco. Kathy would call when it was safe.
She had to get away from Darvin Moon, the restaurant, and certain people. The letter included $200 in twenty-dollar bills. Her parents didn’t believe it. They felt certain Kathy was not alive.
If she were, she’d have contacted them. Then, on March 8th, police got a tip that smoke had been seen over Stony River on the day Kathy disappeared. A burned-out Ford Bronco was found in a remote wooded area a hundred yards from Paul Farrell’s trailer, near the intersection of Bismarck and Cherry Roads. The car had been set on fire intentionally.
Officers searched Paul’s trailer. They found bloodstains in the bedroom, new carpet that had just been installed, and fresh paint in another room. Paul had asked, a few days earlier, that Bismarck and Cherry Roads be exempt from the search. He said evidence had been found near the intersection and he didn’t want it contaminated.
The search coordinator tried to call off the search, but the woman organizing it wasn’t able to. The area was searched anyway. When questioned, Paul denied hurting Kathy Ford in any way. But he admitted they had been having a secret affair for years.
He was arrested on March 20th, 1988. He spent five days in a cell before being released on a bail of $100. The investigation uncovered more. Several women in the area had received strange phone calls, all from a man claiming to be a magistrate.
The calls came in two clusters. The first, between September and November of 1987, asked women to meet near Bayard Wilson Corona Road. The second cluster, around the time Kathy disappeared, asked women to meet near Bismarck Road. Paul Farrell rented trailers in both areas.
The prosecution also found that Paul had made 206 calls to libraries and bookstores across the country, posing as a doctor and asking young female employees to read sexually explicit passages from the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves. ” During one call, the employee heard heavy breathing on the other end. The defense admitted Paul made those calls. They argued it was like calling a sex hotline without having to pay, and that the evidence should be excluded because it was more prejudicial than probative.
A neighbor testified she had heard terrifying screams and a gunshot coming from Paul’s trailer between one and two in the afternoon on February 17th. The next day, she saw Paul hauling carpet out of the trailer. She asked why he was replacing it. He said it was because of a dark stain and an animal odor.
But Kathy Bernard and Paul’s landlord had both been inside the trailer before February 18th. Neither noticed any dark stains or animal odor. That same neighbor later tried to recant her testimony. She claimed the police and FBI had threatened her, saying they’d take her children if she didn’t stick to the story.
Her husband allegedly slapped the table and said, “Damn it, woman, I don’t know if you’re going to tell the truth, but I am. ” But by then she’d already signed the statement. Paul’s trial began on January 25th, 1989. He was charged with kidnapping, second-degree murder, and arson.
He pleaded not guilty to all charges. There was no body. There was no murder weapon. The prosecution built their case entirely on circumstantial evidence.
They presented the phone calls, the burned car, the bloodstains, the letter. The blood test on the stains came back inconclusive. There was no proof the blood was Kathy’s. The judge admitted the evidence anyway.
An FBI agent testified about Paul’s body language during a polygraph test. The agent said that when he read Paul a scenario where Paul acted aggressively and violently toward Kathy, Paul nodded, which the agent interpreted as an admission of guilt. The defense argued Paul might simply have been indicating he understood the question. It was reportedly the first time in America that body language analysis was allowed as expert testimony.
In December 1989, the Glasgow couple who thought they’d seen Kathy in Nashville still held to their story. But nothing had been proven. The jury deliberated. Paul Farrell was found guilty of kidnapping, arson, and second-degree murder.
He was sentenced to life in prison with mercy. The Ford family felt justice had been served. But questions lingered. Some locals noted that the grass and trees around the burned vehicle hadn’t been affected by the fire, leading to speculation that the car had been burned somewhere else and transported to the location.
Others pointed out that no fingerprints, no DNA, no gunshot residue, and no other physical evidence linked Kathy Ford to Paul’s trailer. The blood testimony was called into question. The prosecution’s key witness had recanted, then been pressured to stick to her story. Paul received a psychological evaluation when he entered prison.
The psychologist wrote that Paul showed none of the pathology he would expect to see in a convicted killer. His attorney later hired a forensic psychologist who had done work for the CIA. The psychologist put Paul through a battery of tests and interviewed him extensively. He said, “I would be amazed that Paul Farrell could do something like this.
”
But Paul was in prison for murder. In 1990, he appealed his conviction to the West Virginia Supreme Court. The appeal was denied by a three-to-two vote. In 2001, West Virginia Governor Cecil Underwood commuted Paul Farrell’s sentence.
The order stated that Paul’s convictions were not supported by a body, a weapon, physical evidence, or eyewitness testimony. On his last day in office, the governor granted Paul clemency. Paul was released on parole in 2002, then granted full release by the parole board in May 2004, after serving eighteen years. The investigator who reviewed the case called it one of the most outrageous he’d ever worked on in thirty years.
He described character assassination, a poisoned rumor mill, distorted evidence, and ignored evidence that pointed in other directions. Paul Farrell returned to Gorman and maintained his innocence. Kathy Ford’s body was never found. Her family always believed she was dead.
They never stopped wondering what happened to their daughter on that cold February day. The last anyone ever saw of Kathy Ford, she was heading north in her father’s Bronco, to meet a man who claimed to be a magistrate.
